That was all the memory Wren had — three days, and a wound across his chest that should have killed whoever it belonged to.
The candle woke him before anything else.
Wren opened his eyes to the same stone ceiling as the morning before, and the morning before that.
This wasn’t a dream.
Dreams didn’t leave a wound like the one still healing under his shirt — the one the Head Butler had gone pale looking at three days ago, right before excusing him from duties for the rest of that day.
Duties he’d been dragged back to by the second.
Wren got dressed anyway.
His hands already knew where the uniform hung.
Outside his door, the other servants were doing the same — grabbing buckets and rags in the same order, in the same silence, like the room ran on a schedule none of them had ever been told and all of them somehow already knew.
Nobody looked at Wren.
Nobody looked at anyone.
A bucket of water and a rag sat waiting outside his own door.
Second-floor hallways, before the seedlings woke — that was his task today, same as it had been the day before, when he’d taken too long and only the blood still soaking through his shirt had spared him a beating for it.
Wren didn’t know why or how he’d ended up here.
He filed in line toward his hallway anyway, and began.
Wren didn’t hate cleaning.
If anything, he didn’t mind repetitive tasks at all — over the past few days he’d settled easily into the routine.
Wake up, clean, eat, clean, eat, clean, sleep.
No cracks or free time to think about who he was, or how he’d ended up here.
The water in his bucket went still somewhere around the third hallway, and Wren caught himself looking at his own reflection in it, the way he had every morning since waking up here.
Brown hair, longer than it had any business being for someone in service, hanging into his eyes no matter how many times he pushed it back.
Green eyes underneath it, a little too wide, set in a face he’d been studying for three days now and still couldn’t quite call his.
He kept expecting it to feel familiar eventually.
It hadn’t yet.
Somebody used to know that face, he thought, and scrubbed harder to stop thinking it.
This morning broke the rhythm anyway.
Blood, dark and drying, ran the length of the hallway, pooling in front of one of the doors.
Wren couldn’t tell whether whoever left it had gone inside and stayed, or gone out and never come back — but after a moment, he decided it wasn’t his problem, and got to cleaning.
He finished faster than yesterday, though Wren didn’t let himself think too hard about why blood might make a floor easier to scrub clean.
Grabbing his things, he headed back down to the servants’ quarters in the basement, where breakfast would already be waiting.
This morning proved different from the last, too.
The Head Butler was waiting in the servants’ quarters when Wren arrived.
“Wren.
You’re to come with me,” he said.
“But sir, I haven’t had breakfast ye—”
“Enough.
You’ll eat when we’re done.” The Head Butler didn’t slow down for the objection.
“Orders from the Tower Master — you’re to undergo inspection the moment your morning duties are finished.”
Wren felt his face go pale.
“Yes, sir,” Wren said, and the words came out smaller than he meant them to.
The walk up the tower felt like it took hours, each step draining a little more color from Wren’s face.
Eventually, they reached the heavy door at the top.
The Head Butler knocked twice, then stood back and waited.
“Enter.”
The Head Butler stepped aside, motioning Wren through.
The door was heavy — decorative veins of iron and gold inlaid in an intricate, winding pattern across its surface.
Wren pushed it open slowly.
Behind a desk sat an older man, somewhere in his forties or fifties, black hair speckled grey.
He didn’t look up right away, still reading over a report, and let the silence stretch just long enough that Wren felt every second of it.
The seconds dragged on like hours.
Eventually, the man looked up from his report, and his eyes settled on Wren with the particular weight of someone who’d already read about him before ever seeing him.
“Wren.
How is it you formed a mana circuit without a mage to draw it for you?”
“I—I don’t know, my lord.
I woke up three days ago, in pain, with blood soaking through my chest, and…” Wren trailed off, the sentence going nowhere because the rest of it simply wasn’t there to find.
The man studied him for a moment before continuing.
“I’ve already interviewed every apprentice and first-level mage in this tower.
None of them claim to have helped you.” He set the report down and tapped one finger against a page Wren couldn’t read from where he stood.
“You were tested three years ago, when you first arrived here.
Talent scouts marked you unfit for training — not enough affinity to justify the cost of teaching you.
That’s why you were given to the house-service instead.” His eyes lifted, something unreadable behind them.
“And yet here you are.
No mage touched your core.
No affinity, by every test we ran, and you still managed to draw a circuit precise enough to survive it — when I have never once, in thirty years, seen anyone survive doing this alone.” A pause.
“Either we were simply wrong, testing your will three years ago — or something about house service broke you down enough to build it since.” His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Though if suffering alone were enough, I’d have a tower full of boys drawing circuits in their sleep.
So, it’s likely neither answer is the whole truth.
There’s a third option I like far less.”
He didn’t say what it was.
“Anyway.
You’ll be transferred from house service to mage training, effective immediately.
Fortunately, a new stock of apprentices arrives within the next few days — you’ll begin training alongside them.”
“Thank you for the opportunity, sir,” Wren said, the words shakier than he meant them to be.
“One last thing, Wren.” The Tower Master didn’t look up from his desk this time.
“I hope you aren’t a spy for another tower.
I’ve never once gone easy on a traitor, and I don’t intend to start.”
Something cold settled in Wren’s chest at that — not fear exactly, more the specific unease of being warned about a crime he was fairly sure he hadn’t committed, and only fairly sure of that much.
He nodded and let himself out.
The Head Butler led him to a new room on the second floor — a room he’d cleaned the front of for the past few days, or apparently the past three years, if what the Tower Master had said was true.
“This is your room now.
I heard from the Tower Master you’ll no longer be on my team — I hope you don’t regret what you’ve done, Wren.
The world of mages is far more dangerous than you’d think.” He shut the door behind him and walked off, his footsteps echoing down the hallway.
I guess I’ve really done it now, even if I don’t remember it.
The room itself was small but comfortable: an old desk in the corner, a dozen books resting on the shelf above it, a lantern set beside them.
On the wall hung a set of robes, the same grey worn by the other apprentices, iron and gold accents woven through the fabric — the same pattern from the door to the Tower Master’s office, Wren realized.
On the far side of the room sat a simple bed, though even at a glance, its quality outstripped anything the servants’ quarters had ever offered him.
Wren sat down on the edge of the bed, running his hand along the fabric of the blanket — softer than anything he’d touched since waking up in this tower, softer, he suspected, than anything he’d touched before that too, though there was no real way to know.
He looked toward the robes hanging on the wall, grey and gold and iron, waiting for someone who wasn’t quite him yet to grow into them.
Three days of memory.
Three years of a life he couldn’t reach.
Somewhere between those two numbers was a boy who’d been good enough to survive drawing his own circuit, and not good enough, apparently, to be trusted with a mage’s training in the first place — and Wren had no idea which version of that boy he actually was.
He wasn’t sure who he’d been three years ago.
He was fairly sure that boy hadn’t made it out of the blood on his own chest three days back.
He’d seen what this tower did to people who couldn’t defend themselves.
He didn’t plan on finding out what it did to people who couldn’t cast, either.
Wren pulled the robes down off the wall and got dressed before the sun had even finished rising, pushing the hair out of his eyes one more time as he did.
Whoever I was before doesn’t matter anymore.
Only whoever I become from here does.
If anyone actually reads this some tips and/or feedback would be nice.